Sunday, March 17, 2013

Beautiful Brown

Thank you for your wonderful response to my last post. I actually received a very gracious email from Pam Pierce herself which I thought you would be interested to read.

Dear Sharon,I have been trying to comment on your most recent post regarding my latest Veranda and could not figure out how to make it go thru. I wanted to write you and all of your wonderful readers to thank all of your for your comments. I am thrilled people are so passionate about design.It is exciting to know so many of your readers have followed my work and have such strong feelings about the changes in my home. Many of my clients have come to me with their second or third home and want something new, a new look, something fresh, just different.I think it is exciting to look to the future in design, but you must honor your past as well. Change is fun for me. I experiment on me and not my clients. As you know a girl always the right to change her mind. Just remember girls, if we had not been willing to change and listen to Coco Chanel we would all still be in corsets.I think constructive criticism is a good thing and I thank you all for it. Remember when doing anything in life be true to yourself.Blogging is wonderful and it has excited you all about the industry I love. Please continue with your enthusiasm.SincerelyPam Pierce

One of the things which struck me after my previous post, and which I mentioned in my reply to Pam, was that as much as our blogging community might be divided by matters of taste and style, we are very much united by our love of interior design!

Moving on to today's post....brown is not a colour which one normally associates with beauty but looking at the pictures below, I am sure that we can be convinced otherwise.

It can be introduced as a pattern....

....a stripe or.....

or my personal favourite...a plain deep chocolate brown.

Look at these pictures that follow and notice that the introduction of a single chocolate covered chair can make a room good enough to eat!

Of course...it doesn't have to be a chair. A daybed, a chaise, a sofa, an ottoman or scatter cushions in a rich brown add such warmth to an room.

I adore this bed .... brown and velvet is a match made in heaven!

Brown can also work in a kitchen as these examples show....

Stephen Gambrel wisely said that chocolate-brown fabric can help wooden furniture become part of the overall scheme with a shared color.

These beautiful interiors below have all included brown in varying degrees.

So what do you think - do you see brown as "bland and boring" or "bodacious and beautiful"?

Chocolate brown is definitely "bodacious and beautiful" in my book. I use chocolate brown in something in every single room. I think it gives a warmth that black can not and it mixes with everything. Hey lucky you to have Pam loooking at your blog and she's right we all need to try a little something new but I still love her old style.

Whoa Nelly! Nice post, looooovvve brown, especially if it involves velvet. It is very grounding, humble and rich at the same time. What to pin? What to pin? How cool that Pam Pierce responded to your post/comments? That's the great thing about blogging, it is informative, entertaining and hopefully thoughtful. As long as comments are not disrespectful, I love an open dialogue...I guess we never really think that the people we read/write about actually see it! Ha! Well good for you Miss Sharon, see you soon:)xob

Oh Sharon! I LOVE how you inspired such a wonderful comment from such a design giant! Well done, my far off friend!

I also love this post because it made me decide to go with replacing the living room carpet before our six year old brown sofa. You have given me so much inspiration to "style it pretty" for another year! (Another one of your brilliant stories is bookmarked here on 34th street!)~Lynne withLove.

So happy you did this post! There isn't a room in my house that dosen't have something brown in it. I have always been in love with this color, it richness, lusciouness,scrumptiouness,and the fact that is goes with everything. It is usually the one piece, whether it is, a wood or fabric piece of furniture, that I design the whole room around!

Thanks for this post! I have two velvety chocolate brown sofas in my living room and have struggled with taking many pictures of the for the blog! I love the lightness all over the design world now and have been lightening up my house quite a bit. But I love my sofas and they were expensive so I'm not getting rid of them! But I've been doubting my past choice for awhile now. This was encouraging for me! I just need to learn to work with them!

About Me

I am married with four sons. We live in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. Interior decorating and design has been my passion for as long as I can remember. I am also an incurable Francophile, enjoy good food and fine wine (actually any wine is fine with me) and generally living well.